Designing Respect

Theatrum Mundi is proud to launch Designing Respect, an ideas challenge for new design thinking in Rio de Janeiro.

Since 2014, TM has set a yearly challenge that addresses a political issue specific to an annually changing host city. In New York in 2014, we asked whether urban design interventions can stimulate the use of the First Amendment protecting free speech in public. In London in 2015, we called for the design of systems and situations through which new urban commons could be built.

This year in Rio, with the Olympics looming, we are asking whether an aesthetics of respect can be designed, and what the implications are for the politics of the city.

THE CHALLENGE

Why is respect in such short supply when the city is imagined as a place where everyone shares respect across difference?

We invite teams of residents, artists, activists, architects, performers, and others to identify a space or a social relationship in Rio de Janeiro that you think produces a condition of disrespect in the city.
Then, design plans for an architectural, urban, performative or organisational intervention that enables the condition of respect between people across difference – that produces respect not as a scarce resource, but as one of plenty.

In late September 2016, Theatrum Mundi will mount an exhibition in Rio de Janeiro of the 10 winning entries selected by an innovative peer jury system and accompanied by entries championed by expert jurors.